In this first show of the official summer, we go back to our normal show. We talk about a 2000-era PC game near and dear to us both, the most likely democracy-vs-autocracy throwdown of the early 21st century, and the best Marvel movie we’ve seen lately.
Further reading
Korean artillery: this one is complicated. Check the footnote1.
Airplanes, Crimson Skies style
Crimson Skies on Amazon (Crimson Skies on Win10 guide still to come)
NATO vs. our Asian allies, in Polandball form
(Download)
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- So, the RAF dropped 2,660 long tons of bombs on Dresden on the night of February 14, 1945. This demolished about 6.5 square kilometers of Dresden. Not, as we hyperbolically said in the show, to the foundations, but it certainly reduced the city to rubble with some freestanding walls. The North Koreans are widely believed to have 500 to 700 artillery pieces emplaced in range of Seoul, with some 100 shells a pop, as well as about 4,000 rockets from multiple launcher systems ready to go. Assuming that all of that artillery fires exclusively at Seoul and exhausts all of its ammunition in so doing, the amount of ordnance is approximately similar—in the range of 2500 to 2600 metric tonnes. (Very back of the napkin here.) A couple of points, though: first, Seoul is much bigger than Dresden, and artillery fire hitting the city is likely to be more spread out. These are the simple facts of shooting artillery with no spotters at a range north of 50 kilometers. A square enclosing 6.5 square kilometers does not cover very much of Seoul at all. Second, Seoul is probably more sturdily built than Dresden was. Third, I would be very surprised if North Korea’s towed artillery, no matter how good its fortification, survived to fire all 100 ready rounds, and resupply seems a non-trivial problem in this case. ↩